Watch out for literary critics. They can get feisty.
The New Historicists’ biggest enemies are the New Critics. These two schools have serious beef with one another: when everyone calls themselves New, who gets to be the newest? New Historicism emerged partly in response to New Criticism (well, that answers the newer thing), but the New Critics are all about analyzing the text and nothing but the text.
They’d say things like: who cares about the author’s biography? Or the text’s historical context? Or (heaven forbid!) its economic context?! We just need to sit there with a poem or a novel, take a deep breath, and analyze it. It will give up all its secrets to us if we just read closely. Everything we need to know is already in the text.
To this, the New Historicists say: as if! We can’t understand a text just by doing close reading. We have to find out about everything surrounding the text. Who wrote it? When did they write it? What was happening in the society at the time? What was happening the day the author was writing it? If we don’t know all of these contextual details, we’re bound to misread a work of literature. Through their studies of Renaissance and Romantic authors, the New Historicists set out to prove the New Critics wrong. Way wrong.
Another big issue in the field has to do with the canon. And we’re not talking about the gun that shoots out shells (that’s spelled cannon). We’re talking about the literary canon here: the group of works that is acknowledged to be the “greatest” and “best” in any given literature. If we’re talking about English literature, for example, Shakespeare would definitely be in the canon. So would Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Milton, and Charles Dickens (yup, white dead men. Jane Austen’s there too, if it helps).
So now that you know what the canon is, you should know that the New Historicists think it’s wrong to draw a line between “canonical” and “non-canonical” (read: inferior) literature. When we do that, they argue, we’re just being snobs. And do we really want to be snobs? No.
So the New Historicists get down with studying “non-canonical” works alongside “canonical” works—by putting Shakespeare next to some no-name playwright who nobody’s heard of, for instance. This approach not only pissed a lot of people off; it shocked them. How can we say that non-canonical literature is just as important as canonical literature? Gasp!
But the New Historicists aren’t ones to be easily intimidated. One of their trademarks is to challenge the line between “high” and “low” literature. Heck, they even like to challenge the line between “literary” and “non-literary” texts. Why not analyze a historical document in the same way that we analyze a poem? Who says we can’t? Needless to say, this approach was, and still is, quite controversial. But it’s what the New Historicists are famous for.